The Sugar Conspiracy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Five years later and after many books and articles on nutrition I now fully agree with him. When I hit the grocery store I skip the middle aisles and head straight for the fish and meat counter or the fresh fruit and veg section.
My only (dietary) vices are coffee and the odd glass of wine (both very much man made).
I think that the human body has evolved to run on a certain fuel and of course we adapt but it takes time. Grains and milk are relatively recent to our diet (past 10000 years) so you will see some people who can and some who can't digest them. Sugar however and all the other myriad man made products on store shelves are even more recent and apart from as occasional treats should really be avoided.
As an aside one incredibly beneficial thing people can do for their health is exercise. The lymphatic system which helps rid the body of waste substances is 'pumped' by respiration and physical activity. If you want to eat that cupcake or enjoy that cold glass of beer be sure to exercise it off. It really is incredible how effective exercise can be at covering a multitude of dietary sins!
And exercise, while useful for building muscle mass and increasing your capacity for physical exertion, isn't particularly useful for covering up a poor diet - it would take more than two hours of jogging to burn off the calories in a small Big Mac meal from McDonalds, for example. If you want to lose weight, it's far, far more efficient to simply eat less.
By the way, I am unaware of any evidence that fruit should be eaten in moderation.
There have been studies pointing out fruits even help decrease symptoms of diabetes.
http://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-28...
The conclusion of the randomized study above was that the intake of fruit should not be restricted, despite the fear that sugar makes you die.
http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19711408038.html;jsession...
This one has a mainly fruit diet for its participants. 2500kcal of fruits per day. No one had any serious side effects.
These "not man-made", paleo, keto, low-carb and other diets are all fads. All of them. They promote an unhealthy relationship with food. Not unhealthy as in philosophy but unhealthy scientifically (orthorexia + the humongous evidence that food is not poison).
It's a much higher chance that the American population is extremely orthorexic and that they avoid fruits and veggies thinking that pesticides and sugar will kill them. This unhealthy relationship results in overeating highly caloric foods like meat, dairy, eggs, drinks etc.
I highly recommend
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
http://www.amazon.com/Defence-Food-Nutrition-Pleasures-Eatin...
The Gluten Lie
http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Lie-Other-Myths-About/dp/194139...
for anyone thinking they have an unhealthy relationship with food that could cause them to have an unhealthy diet.
There is of course no need to bath them in fat, 1 egg has ~80-90 calories, they are mostly water.
They are certainly higher in calories than vegetables, but if you consider the typical diet, they are not towards the high end of calorie density.
I don't think I'd consider either of those man-made in the sense of being heavily processed: coffee is simply roasted coffee beans with hot water poured over, and wine is pressed grape juice allowed to ferment.
Not only is wine sometimes made with products like nuts and milk, it can even be made using fish guts!
https://www.organicwine.com.au/what-makes-a-wine-vegan
A French wine maker told me this. I had no idea...these "extras" are not on the label.
Wine is even made with people!
That's more likely to get you awful vinegar than anything even remotely resembling wine.
It's all about controlling the cultures you use for the fermentation.
That's why home-brewers have to be so careful about sterilizing their fermentation vessels and boiling their liquids. You absolutely, positively do not want the wrong microbe getting into your booze. If it's a wild one, it could end up synthesizing any number of organic chemicals that can negatively affect the final product.
The boiling happens with beer, mostly. With wine, you're usually relying on the yeast that naturally occurs on the surface of the grapes, so if you boiled (or pasteurized) it, there would be no fermentation unless you added additional yeast. That sometimes happens, because some people prefer consistency to authenticity.
Home brewers use fermentation vessels that allow gases to escape through a liquid trap and the whole process is done at positive pressure. You can bet your ass that those vessels are thoroughly sterilized before each use.
We may be talking past each other here.
Fermentation produces so much CO2 that it quickly fills up the vessel and pushes any remaining oxygen out. People didn't know where yeast comes from until recently. You're making it far more complicated than it is.
Though it depends a lot on your culture. The "kefir" sold commercially in the US does not have yeast in the culture, and therefore no alcohol or vinegar. It doesn't really qualify as real kefir. You have to acquire cultures and make your own to get the full experience. You also have to acquire a taste for it.
That's way too simple. It's a kind of naturalistic fallacy as applied to food.
If you think your produce area is where you should be getting your calories (not disagreeing), it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural."
Getting back to the linked article a bit, if you think fructose is bad, you should know it is very natural. Obviously it occurs in fruits and honey has more fructose than refined sugar and about the same as high fructose corn syrup.
(As a side note, I'm of the opinion we should be engineering foods to make them better for us. We as a species have been doing similar things to our food for thousands of years.)
If you consider it as a heuristic instead of taking it literally, your objection about artificial selection of produce is also more or less irrelevant. Man had a hand in shaping those plants' current genome, but if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making (most of) them. It's still easy to distinguish from, say, donuts and still useful as a heuristic.
One quick thing I would add is, "NO" nature would not keep making them. It is only our direct action that props up these artificially selected species (q.v., hybrids that require us to actively produce them, or your favorite variety of apple which is a clone of some great-grandparent tree or the fact that these crops would not compete well with other plants because we've selected them for their food production, not overall hardiness. They'd be out competed. They put too much of their energy into producing stuff that doesn't optimally help produce a new generation, and thus require our tending).
Your statement is a bit like saying "if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making sheep." Probably not (at least medium term). Sheep generally require our protection to avoid being killed. It probably wouldn't take long for a predator species to take hold in a given area and kill them all.
Sure, the banana is a selectively bred, sterile monocrop but the candy is made of 20 ingredients, resembling nothing found in nature in composition and nutrition.
Simplistic heuristics have failed hard before in nutrition, so why do we keep repeating the new ones?
The only one that makes any sense is "Eat food, not too much, and mostly fruit and veg".
Michael Pollan, who promoted (and possibly introduced) that slogan in his book In Defense of Food, goes on to explain that "Eat food" means more specifically "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (p. 148). In short, he agrees exactly with Jack Lalanne: avoid processed foods.
It basically posits that ALL sugar, from fructose, to organic brown sugar to high fructose corn syrup is broken down to the same basic molecule: glucose.
Even white rice, potatoes and bread break down similarly. It was sobering viewing and highly recommended. The 5:2 diet proponents also suggest the same thing from their research - that natural sugars are no better than unnatural sugars (at least according to the doc).
You're overthinking this. "Is this food packaged and processed with preservatives, a list of 40 ingredients, and has a shelf life of 6 months to 5 years? Then I'm not buying it. Is it meat or product? It's ok." This is referring pretty specifically to Franken-foods, not GMOs (which I too think are a great idea, and essentially optimizing our agricultural practices over the last 20,000-whatever years).
Quick example, my mother-in-law (who is into all kinds of weird "food woo" (she's a drink-raw-milk-only, avoid-adrenal-stressing-foods, etc. kind of person) once handed me a some sort of baked good--a bread perhaps--and mentioned, "It has no preservatives." My quick, honest, reply was "bummer." She had meant to "no preservatives" as being a good thing, as lots of folks do. The thing is, preservatives are a GOOD thing (well, unless you're preserving your food with something known to be harmful). It means less food waste, and that you're less likely to be unknowingly eating (mildly) spoiled food.
We have made missteps in our advancement in the production of food, and we as a whole don't eat as healthy of food as we should, but on the whole, modern agricultural practices are a good thing, as are some modern processing of food that people don't like because it's not "natural." I'm swayed by the preponderance of quality evidence on this, not anecdotes, intuition, and studies that represent noise in the data due to known problems with the generation of data.
Whilst Jack Lalanne's quote 'if man made it don't eat it' is simplistic it's basically saying go for the steak or the bag of salad leaves rather than the corn dog and powdered mash potato.
This isn't about 'weird' foods like raw milk, or taking things to the nth-degree. It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it. As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.
Does that mean I'm not gonna pepper my cod fillet, of course not. But I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!
>This isn't about 'weird' foods like raw milk, or taking things to the nth-degree. It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it. As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.
That's the thing. The first and last sentence of this quote run contrary to each other in the cited example. When we process raw milk by pasteurizing it, we are making it BETTER. We've tinkered with it, to use your word. "As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best" (emphasis added) is not necessarily true. (As an aside, there is nothing "weird" about raw milk other than your lack of exposure to it. I grew up in rural Wisconsin in the 1980s--as a kid, I've had plenty of raw milk. We all did living there. Heck, I used to milk cows and I once tried to see if I could squirt raw milk directly from the teat into my mouth at arms length--it doesn't get much fresher! As an adult, I avoid raw milk because I know better.)
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Related to battered fish, what's better (from a health standpoint): if you batter your own fish or you buy pre-battered fish? All else equal, most people would still say that as a matter of intuition will say that battering your own is better. If "feels" like the correct answer. But the real answer would be that it depends on what you battered it with and what the company battered it with. The reality is that many people who actively complain about "processed foods" are fine with the processing done as long as they are the ones doing it. Regardless of what the reality may be, a homemade noodle somehow feels healthier than a store bought one to those folks.
(And yes, I realize my battered fish question isn't what your fish example was talking about at all. I just ran with it in a different direction and am not trying to misrepresent what you said).
I have no idea what they are putting into commercially processed foods, how long they are cooked for at what temperature. (Well I have an idea of what goes into chicken nuggets having watched Jamie Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKSoiDtdi9s).
I think there's logic to regarding more recent food innovations with greater skepticism. Same with many innovations. Over a shorter time period, the long-term consequences of the innovations have not yet become fully apparent. With things that have been used for thousands of years we can assume that had a long-term issue arisen, the food or practice would likely have been abandoned.
Radium watches, DDT, hydrogenated vegetable oils, ....
I get that to many, science is a boogeyman - but come on, we're meant to be better than that on HN, since you know, so many of do actually have science backgrounds?
My parents owned a sheep property growing up, and I went to an agricultural school - the whole point of modern agriculture, and husbandy pratcises is that we do intentional thinks to manipulate animals/plants, to be safer for us.
Oh, and my wife is a veterinarian - and occasionally she gets crazies in, who think they can roadkill or dead wildlife - she's like, yeah, genius, great way to give yourself worms.
And preserved foods is...well, just that - to preserve food.
You know, like pasteurised milk?
Humans have been preserving food for millennia - it's just that our techniques have evolved a bit more than "add salt, let it dry in the sun".
I think many people might be equating junk food (i.e. sweets, chips etc.) with all modern foods - that's a logical fallacy. Food companies optimised for things consumers want - whether that's long shelf-life, for taste, for convenience etc.
We are so incredibly lucky these days - that we have massive range of foodstuff - just make sure you read the food labels, and pick the foods you want.
If convenience, or high-sweetness isn't what you want - then don't buy those products. Buy other products!
Ultimately, corporates aren't some evil faceless entity - nor do I believe there's some mysterious conspiracy going on.
They simply create what they think people will buy - and hence, make them money.
But I agree with parent - the whole "eat stuff that humans haven't touched" is a bit of a stupid argument - it's like romanticising pre-historic men.
In reality - they probably had hard, short lives, and were subject to parasites and infection constantly - a lot of it via the food they ate.
There are a thousand choices you can make when it comes to diet. It's not an all or nothing, democrat or republican, us vs them proposition. What the previous poster was getting at is that typically, for each choice you can make with your diet, a good rule of thumb is that the less processed a food is, the more likely it is to be better for you. That doesn't mean it's always true in every case, or that occasionally a bit of processed food will kill you, or whatever other straw man you are chasing after.
In any case, there IS plenty of science backing up the negative health effects of processed foods:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-too-much-added-sug...
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesit...
http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/22693-highly-processed-food...
http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/news/world-health-organiza...
http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/di...
http://www.ewg.org/research/bpa-canned-food
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/transfats/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects
Plenty of linked studies here as well:
https://authoritynutrition.com/9-ways-that-processed-foods-a...
Do you have any science to back up your claims?
It isn't an all or nothing stance.
And the whole black-and-white "Don't eat processed foods" rule is exactly what I'm arguing against.
I don't think it's a good rule of thumb - you need to actually put some thought and consideration into what you're eating - e.g. read the food labels!
Everybody's personal stance is difference. For example, I eat heaps of "processed foods" - heck, I eat Soylent (https://www.soylent.com/) which is about as processed as you can possibly get.
Please also read the parent I was replying to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941#
Also, with regard to the articles that you spammed your post with (I assume you just keep a notepad with these around grins):
1. Article 1 (Too much added sugar is bad for you, and can lead to heart disease) - not to put a fine point on it, but no sit sherlock? Like, seriously? It doesn't matter whether it's processed or not (e.g. "natural" sugar, or say, honey), if you drizzle sugar all over your food, to the point of excess, yes, it's going to make you fat and at higher risk of heart disease. 2. Article 2 (Diet Quality) - There are two paragraphs (or clustered paragraphs) that reference "processed" in this article - the first refers to eating less red meat and less processed meat - so yes, I'm guessing that too much "natural" steak, or too much spam isn't great for you. I don't think anybody ever regarded spam as a health food (although I could be wrong, spam was before my time). There are ways to process meat and have it be healthy - the tradeoff, is I suppose you don't get the awesome taste of spam (lol), or the incredibly long shelf-life. The second point is that whole grains are better for you, as they are digested more slowly - you get the full grain, as opposed to just the tasty part. 3. Article 3 (Processed food can be addictive) - Reading the article, we learn that processed foods in this case is code for foods like "chocolate, French Fries, pizza, and ice cream" - umm, I think the point of those foods it that they taste good? As in, nobody ever said, gee, I feel like health food, let me get some of that pizza or ice cream. sigh*. The whole damn point of these foods is that they're engineered to taste food - they're not exactly marketed as "health foods", so it's not exactly like pizza or ice cream companies are misleading you. Also, chocolate is interesting, in that it can be very "natural" - but still very addictive.
I'm not going to go through and decipher/debunk every single one of your articles.
But my point is simple - there's very little in the way of a blanket "don't eat processed foods" in the links you posted.
For some people, they might think it a useful guideline - but I suspect in this case, they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
For myself - I just read the food label, and exercise some common-sense. If it's confectionery, or it's a "treat" food (whether processed or natural - although to be honest, it's more a spectrum of how processed, since nearly any food you can legally buy is processed to some degree), I exercise moderation.
With 5 minutes of Googling, I can find similar analogues to argue that so-called "organic" or natural food is bad or even toxic for you:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogss... http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/03/eating-organic-may-be...
In general - I think modern agriculture and food techniques have been a boon for humanity - they've given us safe, large-scale food production to feed the masses. We've eradicated pests/diseases from our crops, and also engineered our crops to be more pest/disease resistant, have higher-yields and taste better. So we've been "processing" food for a long time. And we've moved from salting/drying things, to more modern preservation techniques, that preserve the nutritional content and taste of our food as well, and prolong shelf-life and packability of foodstuffs.
But of course, then we have modern inventions like the Twinkie, or the <insert junk food of choice>. I honestly hope people aren't arguing these are health foods. But if you argue that "processed" foods are bad, because they also gave us the Twinkie - well, you're basically throwing out all the added benefits (convenience, low-cost, shelf-life) of modern foods.
Even the fresh fruits/vegetables we buy are quite "processed" - I actually prefer this to so-called organic food-stuffs, because I know the food safety regulations around your supermarket fruit/vegetables are so much stricter than for organic farms. And I'm also fine with buying a pre-packaged salad in a sealed plastic bag, even though it's processed, because I know it was probably washed by machine, and they have health and safety checks in the processing pipeline, to ensure pathogens are at acceptable levels. (although I do confess to occasionally rinsing them again, for possibly irrational reasons).
And calling "rule of thumb" black and white indicates that you aren't familiar with the typical usage of the term, which is the opposite of "black and white".
If you can't conceive of the concept of processing as being a spectrum of more or less transformation of the initial food item, then there isn't any reason to further this discussion. If you think that cleaning lettuce is the same as using a bioreactor to change the chemical structure of a food, you are just plain wrong.
You said:
> I'm of the exact same dietary philosophy as yourself. I derived it through reading and experimentation before paleo was even a thing, as it appears Jack Lalanne did as well. Most people who attack a simple sensible diet like this are really just exposing their own insecurities and desire to not give up the crap they injest themselves.
> a good rule of thumb is that the less processed a food is, the more likely it is to be better for you".
The things you have just named are processing - so it may make more sense if you actual clarify what exactly it is you are against?
What does it mean for a food to be "less" processed, then?
While true, this isn't because humans are incapable of improving food. It's because the ways our species has been improving food recently have been driven by capitalism; we've been making it easier to grow and giving it more appealing taste so that it's easier to mass produce and sell. These qualities, especially the taste 'improvements', often result in significant reductions in nutritional quality. If Big Aggro were instead focusing on making our veggies more nutritious, I'm confident that they would succeed.
The market is an emergent phenomenon. A market is indeed made up of corporations which is made up of people, but this does not mean that "just made up of people" is an adequate answer.
The problem is that these simplifications and generalizations are invariably broken. According to this, for example, raw meat should be better than cooked meat.
A carefully carved out subset of an animal that lived on a carefully maintained agricultural plot, fed a precisely calibrated diet, and slaughtered at a precisely chosen time. An animal of a special humans have been breeding and molding for thousands of years.
> bag of salad leaves
Again, species we have been cultivating and changing for so long that we would no longer recognize its original wild form. Lettuce is related to daisies.
> It's just common sense advice that humans seldom make a food healthier by tinkering with it.
That common sense makes no sense, why would we spend effort making things worse for ourselves?
We tinker with things because it improves them. Sure, sometimes we don't discover the long term implications for a while (like with sugar), but in general, we cultivate and process because it makes things better.
Cassava that isn't processed is poisonous, as are many beans. Eating most fish that isn't deep frozen or thoroughly cooked is a good way to get worms. The same would be true for beef and pork too, except that we humans have so carefully managed (tinkered with?) our livestock that we've eliminated most of their parasites.
Given a choice between a package of heavily processed bacon from the grocery store, or a fresh chunk of wild boar meat that you hunted and killed yourself, which is better for you? Well, the latter is a hell of a lot more likely to give you trichinosis.
> As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.
So, like:
Corn: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/images/relevance/Z_...
Watermelon: https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CRPlJWtfmDnCTNMv02Cx1DSiaws...
> I sure as heck am not going to buy a pre-battered pack of frozen 'fish fingers' given the choice!
That's not because the fish fingers are unnatural, it's because they're made of shitty, cheap ingredients.
Given the choice between, say, a nice cheese (a very heavily processed food involving a number of chemicals and months of human attention) versus finding a wild bee's nest and drinking all the honey, the former would be healthier for you, even assuming you don't get stung.
If you want to eat things that are good for you, "natural", "unprocessed" or "free from human tinkering" are simply not useful signals. They're not even that well-defined.
Also, modern food production is not an unqualified great thing.
Too simplistically: We consumers are harmed when optimal food production techniques drive nutrition policy, vs human nutritional needs guiding food production.
Over use of HFCS, soya, whey, etc has caused a great deal of human disease. It's now an expensive public health issue.
What may cause you (intellectual) discomfort is when the woo-woos conflate health and environmental issues. Again, filters.
And please remember that everyone's just trying to move forward best as they can. My mother also imparts some terrible, well intentioned advice. But it's not like I'm going to fix her misunderstandings. I just try to guide best as I can and lead by example.
The intent, I'm sure, is to advise people to avoid foods that have undergone an industrialized food-preparation process, to produce a shelf-stable product that can be shipped in cardboard boxes. As an aggregate, those foods are overwhelmingly prepared according to USDA and FDA recommendations, resulting in the very common replacement of fats with simple carbohydrates, addition of preservatives, and the use of additional additives to improve flavor and texture.
That maxim is to be applied in the grocery store, while looking at the product in your hand. If it's a bag of potato chips, you look at it and think, "how is this made?" Then you are supposed to remove the boiling in oil and the slicing, and buy raw, whole potatoes instead. If it's a package of Oreos, you're supposed to read the ingredients, be horrified at the claim that it is food, and perhaps buy a nice, crisp apple instead.
You're not going to achieve optimal nutrition with sound-bite-sized dietary advice, but if there isn't a lot of space left in your brain's on-die cache, it could help to avoid making the most horrible dietary decisions. But only if it is good bite-sized advice.
If you decide to only eat "natural" foods, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And also, you may have a bizarre and nonsensical concept of what is "natural". But it will probably stop you from eating the foods most highly suspected of causing health problems, such as those containing trans-fats, fructose, or poor Na:K or Ca:Mg proportions.
It's like trying to fight an add tag line with logic, it just doesn't make sense. We all know "number one in stuff" is not to be taken as is.
Still, if you do avoid industrialy processed food, you usually see your health improved tremendously.
TL;DR: don't be that guy : https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source...
http://www.gbhealthwatch.com/Trait-Salt-Sensitivity.php
Late life heart disease probably hasn't been a major factor in our evolution, but it's easy to sketch out how a lifetime of dietary choices that encouraged high blood pressure would have some impact in the last years.
The problem is that people are ignorant with regards to the purpose and effects of various food additives/ingredients, so they just take the simplified stance "more ingredients = bad" rather than do a little research. As a heuristic it might be fairly functional (you can still eat unhealthily without processed foods though), but it means you're going to spend a lot of time preparing food and you're missing out on the opportunity for engineered superfoods.
Cod liver oil comes to mind ...
Sucrose = glucose + fructose. Glucose good, fructose bad. Fiber in fruit prevents uptake of fructose. Which is why orange is okay, orange juice bad. A pretty good example of Lalanne's messaging.
No. See sibling responses. I'm not being pedantic, I'm trying to point out natural != good. Processing != bad either. Cooking is processing, and is a good thing, most of the time. I mentioned preservatives in a sibling reply, again generally a good thing. For example, the "no preservatives" crowd often have been very selective in the data they've looked at. That's all. Question assumptions about what's is and isn't bad for you. (And there is plenty of refinement and such that isn't good for you--don't get me wrong).
I think a better heuristic, is "Just eat what your great-grandma ate". Or avoid the middle of the supermarket as much as possible.
Simply eating more fat and less sugar/carbs, I have lost 10+ pounds and feel much better. These nutrition fads have done more harm than good. My mother switched from butter to Crisco when I was a kid, then she banned salt from the house, and bought (high sugare, low fat) snack wells for us. All based on poor/pseudo science.
The diabetes and obesity are modern problems caused by a diet that our bodies haven't evolved to handle.
I like that!
I had some friends over for a small dinner party a few weeks back. One of them was helping me in the kitchen butter some sour dough bread. Mid-way through she stopped agog just staring. I looked to where her eyes were staring and realized she was shocked at how much butter I was smearing on each slice of bread.
I'm active and believe in eating a lot of natural fats, but I realized that even young adults subscribe to the demonization of saturated fat. (I might also be a little too inclined to eat butter and coconut oil - so moderation - as always is important if we're to not alienate everybody).
Unfortunately that's not always possible as we have selectively bred over time for appearance, size and/or sugar content in our fruits, vegetables and even meat at the expense of macro- and micronutrients.
We have also begun overly sanitizing our foods, pasteurizing everything and adding antibiotics to the detriment out our gut microbiome.
In many cases the food our great grandmas ate doesn't exist anymore.
Snarky "lead paint?" aside, this only really works if you're also as active as great-grandma was. Chances are she got a lot more exercise than we modern folk do.
"There has been no commensurate decline in physical activity, in either country – in the UK, exercise levels have increased over the last 20 years."
Sure, exercise is important, but a potential lack of it is not the problem. The most significant way you can interact with you body is through the food/drink you put in your mouth.
Food has changed so much over the past few decades that most people no longer eat food but instead consume food like products.
In a natural environment, the only real sources of fructose are either fiber-heavy (most fruits) or somewhat rare (honey, berries).
Fructose is bad. It's certainly something that should be eaten in moderation.
Your food is not being engineered to be better for you. It's being engineered to be cheaper and easier to produce and sell. There are trade-offs.
If you consume 10 cans of coke a day, and you're over your maintenance caloric intake by 1000 calories daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy. if you overconsume sweet potatoes by 1000 calories over your maintenance intake daily. guess what? you'll get fat and probably not be healthy.
Yeah it does come across as too simple. I've heard a variation of it, also attributed to Lalane, that says, "If it comes in a wrapper, don't eat it." The idea is that if it's in a wrapper, it has preservatives added, and also sugar added to make it taste good.
In any case, it seems people love attributing quotes to Lalane!
I think people trying to give nutritional advice should just list the actual categories of food they're referring to, rather than trying to get cute. If you want to say "eat unprocessed fruit, vegetables, and meat, and avoid the rest" then just say that. To me, whenever I see somebody trying to get clever with their wording, it just comes off as moralizing. It feels like either "you should know this man-made stuff is bad for you, you idiot" or "I'm better than you because my food is 'natural.'"
The idea that more natural foods are generally healthier than less natural foods is based mainly on inductive reasoning, eg. breast milk vs baby formula, grass fed cattle vs grain and animal protien fed cattle, vitamins in plants vs vitamins in tablets, animal welfare limits vs antibiotics and growth stimulants etc
Those pretty packages of meat are just as much "man made" as the foods you demonize. If you want to eat meat, I suggest hunting and only using your teeth and hands (claws?) to kill your prey and to eat the meat raw; gotta eat all of it too, no picking and choosing what parts you want either.
"If you want to eat that cupcake or enjoy that cold glass of beer be sure to exercise it off."
This is HORRIBLE advice. Treating exercise like a punishment for enjoying food is like a one-way ticket to Eating Disorder Town. Diet and exercise are important, but they should be used to compliment each other and not to negate being bad at the other.
To be honest there's a big problem with seeing exercise as a 'punishment'. I enjoy exercising just as much as I enjoy a cold glass of beer (before or after) and to be frank my advice suggest the two are complementary.
He also said "if it tastes good, spit it out" which is just retarded, as there's plenty of things that taste good that are good for you (bananas, apples and broccoli jump immediately to my mind). I respect the man for his accomplishments, but those two quotes aren't among them.
> The lymphatic system which helps rid the body of waste substances is 'pumped' by respiration and physical activity.
This I've always "felt" to be true, as it seems to me that my allergies get better with exercise. That being said, you can't outrun your fork, and even if you're eating "healthy", if you eat too much, you will gain weight. I'm not saying you can never have a tasty treat again, just don't try to compensate for it via exercise. Work it into your daily calorie budget.
Not saying these are not better for you then Fruit Loops, but it good to keep some prospective as how man made or man "designed" ALL our food is.
Did a man (or machine) literally put it together with two hands? This is the distinction being made.
People have been eating wild wheat for at least 50,000 years and archeologists published a paper in the December, 2009, issue of Science on their discovery in Mozambique of stone tools with wild grain residues dating some 105,000 years ago.
Also keep in mind that most of humanity is lactose tolerant now while less than 1% was even 10k years ago and the prevalence of blue eyes has increase from a rounding error to over 6% of the human race. Human evolution is 100 times the rate it was in prehistoric times according to some estimates.
It follows one simple guideline 'Avoid anything that lacks DNA.'.
I'm not taking sides here, I'm saying that you are being selective about what you choose to believe in a way that is not entirely supported by science. Yes you can selectively come up with science to support your beliefs, but what this article is about is how for many many years in modern times we all arrogantly believed the wrong science.
Your comment strikes me that you are not reading the news story about sugar as a cautionary tale against believing things that could quite well not be true.
I myself doubt that there is a magic diet that makes us live a long time, because living a long time is not something we evolved for; rather, we evolved to eat anything we could get our hands on because living thru times of shortage was more important than maybe having an allergy that made us gassier. 2nd order effects have a lot of trouble overcoming firsts.
And if you enjoy exercise, great! but if you don't enjoy it, remember that the hour you spend running will not lead to you living an hour longer, so you just shortened your overall enjoyable life, while you also increased your carbon footprint which is a socially selfish thing to do. See what I mean? these things just cannot be reduced to formulas for how we should live.
For starters, it's wrong to suggest that there's a direction or purpose to evolution[1]. The current shape of human life is no indication that we have 'progressed' from where we previously were, or where we will be in the future (as far as evo bio is concerned). As such, to suggest that we were 'supposed' to get smallpox because we did not evolve a natural immunity to it is not a statement that conforms to our understanding of evolution. Neither does it make sense that, because in the developed world, people have tended to become more sedentary, it is a desired end goal for humans to become 'lazier'. If that were the case, we should also be willing to argue that childlessness is the desirable state for living organisms, as the more education and wealth humans accumulate, the less likely they are to have children[2]. I don't fully follow your reasoning on exercise, but as it is intended to counteract the documented effects of overeating, I'm not sure it is a sound thesis to suggest it won't increase your lifespan.
1: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/teleology.html 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSO9pOVpRM
there is a direction and purpose to evolution, it's: replicate or cease to exist.
Whilst I can imagine soylent is nutritionally dense and quite possibly very sound from that point of view the work of Weston Price would strongly suggest a major problem with lack of good mastication.
The skull isn't as static a structure as we might believe it turns out and lack of effective nutrition AND chewing caused many problems in people (weakening of the jaw and facial muscles and subsequent narrowing of the palate and skull) according to his studies.
Basically we can try and stray from the path our ancestors took but not too far too quick! Our bodies only evolve so fast so yep, even soylent probably has its downsides.
Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
You can get fat by eating too much protein. Or too much fat. Intense overeating of any macro-nutrient is a bad idea. The thing is, it's harder (though by no means difficult) to overeat fat or protein.
The dangerous thing about carbohydrates is they are by far the easiest to overeat, and may have the greatest health consequences. That's a scary combination.
By extension of this adage, then, if you eat fat you get fat. If you eat carbs you get starchy, and if you eat protein you get muscley. We know the second two aren't true, but the first one sticks for some reason.
This appears unlikely/citation needed. You may die from it, but not by getting fat.
For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
" If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken."
But also sad. Not sure how that problem will be solved...
[1] http://www.econ.upf.edu/~fonsrosen/images/planck_complete_12...
In biology, there is even less certainty and established theories routinely fail to reproduce. Is Central Dogma of Molecular Biology true? How it couldn't be with such a name? Well, no, there is now a lot of evidence against it.
And don't even get me started on climate science.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33
Nearly all the butter is bad is funded by the spread industry.
Either way the milk is coming from a cow pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.
Fairly recently UK was prosecuted for not checking antibiotic levels adequately.
It's just amazing how the point that sugar causes obesity and other harms has been ridiculed for decades but is now starting to be widely accepted. Huge amounts of data were ignored, and now the case is pretty overwhelming.
People have really weird relationships with food, often taking concepts to the extreme. Too much sugar is bad, so limit added sugar intake as much as possible and prefer artificial sweeteners to sugar.
Rather than sensibly moderating consumption we've gone from eating far too much of one thing, to trying to eat none of it, and indeed trying to replace it with something completely artificial. Not to sound like one of those "anything that's natural is better for you" people.
It's just a lateral move.
No carbs vs. no fats might turn out to be a bad thing as well.
It makes me wonder if as humans we make generalities too often that cause us to take up sub optimal behaviors that have long term negative outcomes.
You: but he's a physicist, in biology things are harder to prove
(the point is that people have confirmation bias even when things are 'easier' to prove)
People have confirmation bias regardless of being shown evidence, it's the central feature of confirmation bias that you interpret new information in a way that supports your pre-existing view. It's a human trait not a feature of the subject matter.
You can experiment on yourself for free! Obviously this won't prove how everyone's body works. But it will teach you something very powerful about how your own body works.
Go off sugar for 3 months, make your mind and do it, and note the changes in your organism.
Or go off carbs totally for a few weeks, and feel what happens to you.
etc...
Make up your own experiments, the only danger is that you may end up lying to yourself about what you ate, or not be sure about the composition of the stuff you ate...
I would have to drink 1 gram of warm saltwater and my headache would instantly go away.
So how you feel is deceptive. If I would drink a Vanilla Latte at Starbucks now, I would get a serious headache...
Well, yeah you are right. At some point you will have to read and educate yourself a bit to try and guess what is happening to your body.
But as a rule of thumb if you stick to a no sugar habit for 3 months your headaches should not last for more than a few weeks, if they don't subside and you keep feeling "unhealthy" obviously its time to get medical advice, but I argue the same would be true if you were to keep to a sugar heavy "current normal" sort of diet.
If you're mostly sedentary in a first-world country, going off sugar/carbs-dominated diet brings your insulin sensitivity to its natural levels (which, very probably, it hasn't been since the moment you started eating adult food). For me this had the amazing effect of becoming more alert and productive mentally and more aware of my body physically. As an athlete, I suddenly discovered that I can be underperforming because I'm lacking fuel, and not because I'm tired, and that if I "fuel up" by eating carbs, I can expect a surge of energy that will allow me to perform well. Needless to say, the discovery was amazing, I felt like a finely tuned sports car or something.
Back when I was eating a regular western diet, my insulin sensitivity was low, and "injecting" fast carbs made me drowsy, not full of energy.
Needless to say once I experienced that new state, I got hooked, so sticking to good eating habits haven't required tremendous will power for me. Getting there, though, did.
Anyway, my approach is simple and unscientific, but it seems to work for me. I just treat any carb-rich food as fuel (there is a difference as to "slow" vs "fast" carbs, but it's not important for the purposes of this discussion :)).
So, since it's fuel, I use it as such. For example, if I'm in my sedentary/low stress mode, I eat just a token amount of them. If I'm preparing for a gruelling match or bulking up at the gym, I'll load up on carbs (ideally the day before the match). If I'm cutting, I reduce the amount considerably.
As for fat/protein/fiber, that's pretty much an invariant. I just eat a normal healthy amount. I do increase protein intake on the days I work out a lot, though.
A lot of them [us] are catching up, especially in the UK, where the diet has been Americanized.
After a few months on that diet anything rich in sugar gave me a massive short lived energy rush, I actually didn't much like the feeling so now I only eat complex carbs and hardly anything with a lot of sugar (lots of cruciferous vegetables, not a lot of high sugar fruits).
I've found that throughout the day my mood and general feeling is pretty constant rather than up and down like a yo-yo.
One major change was much higher "energy"/"alertness levels after lunch and after dinner. No more sleepy low energy "food coma" feeling after meals.
Where I would usually feel like laying on the sofa after a long day's work and dinner, now I had the urge to go out on my bicycle, even at night and in winter cold.
Although I have to admit that like most people who do drastic diet changes I had a relapse and went back to eating sugar again after the five months. This relapse happened gradually, where I naively convinced myself that I was no longer addicted to sugar, and started by having a treat once a week, which quickly became once a day ...
The mental change is still ingrained in me though, I now treat sugar like a dangerous addictive substance and I'm trying to get rid of it like any other "substance abuser".
It started with pet food. Attempts at making plant based foods for dogs and cats initially failed, becuase the animals didn't want to eat these unnatural diets. But a solution was found: the so called "palatants". When they were added to the food, animals ate it.
Naturally, somebody thought of using these in human food as well. It didn't work as expected - it turned out they don't work by making the food tastier, they work by disabling the satiety response. Once the palatants get into your bloodstream, you won't feel satisfied no matter how much you eat until your body can get rid of these these chemicals. You may feel that your stomach is completely filled and stop eating, but you won't ever feel that you ate enough.
Since adults would get suspicious if they got more hungry, it started with child menus. The idea was the same as with pet food - if children eat a lot of the food, their parents will buy it again.
Now we have at least two generations of people who believe it's perfectly normal not to feel satisfied until their stomach can't hold any more food and that staying not obese requires arduous discipline. Our perception of normal weight has changed as well, for pets and human alike. Cats, when fed unaldutered meat eat to stay very skinny, with body shape that many modern guidelines show as "very thin" or "underweight". But many people today think of them as naturally fatty animals.
Many of these chemicals are approved food aditives and are listed usually as emuglators, flour conditioners or something similarly inconspicious.
Yes, consuming high amounts of fructose on a daily basis has some serious side effects. Consuming the same amount of glucose doesn't.
This just means that the amount of fructose intake should be moderated.
Seems to be that the majority of this community believes there are concept such as healthy food, unhealthy food, superfood etc. These concepts are scientifically non-existent.
There's such a thing, scientifically, as an unhealthy diet and healthy diet.
Sugar can be a part of a healthy diet. So can hamburgers, so can everything else.
There's been bunch of evidence for UK and Australia (where fructose intake decreased over the years) but they still got fatter and fatter.
Sugar tax is idiotic.
Lustig: Sugar makes people obese.
Reality: Carbs, fat and sugar makes people obese.
American population started eating ridiculously huge amounts of food. They'll get fat no matter what they eat if the caloric intake is 3700kcal per day.
"By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core."
Fortunately we have people like Lyle McDonald, Alan Aragon, Guyenet out there talking some sanity. Unfortunately, they never make it to mainstream media.
Some Resources:
http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/index.php/free-cont...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2016/01/testing-insuli...
https://medium.com/@lylemcdonald/highly-processed-carbohydra... (A comment by Lyle on the rhetoric posted by Ludwig)
You can't outrun your fork. Even if you want to create a caloric deficit through increased activity level, you'll need to hold intake constant, therefore you most likely have to track it to begin with. These days with things like MyFitnessPal there is no excuse. And while it's possible to lose weight without tracking (I've done it), it's not nearly as straightforward.
If people are truly lazy, they'd put down the fork, as that's all that's needed, no time "wasted" at the gym necessary. But hunger is a hard thing to beat, and willpower can be used up, not to mention a lot of other factors (mindless eating, eating for comfort or to self-medicate, etc).
People have this misconception that "addiction" can only be to something that you can live without (such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, the Internet or gaming), when in truth you can be addicted to anything. If there's anything I'd demonize refined sugar for, it would be that it's easy to get addicted to, especially as it's put into far too many foodstuffs. Otherwise, it's just calories, and if you want it, fit it into your daily caloric budget.
Sure, calories in and out matter, but it's very clear to me that the human body is complex, and if someone else has a body that reacts similar to mine, only with a significantly higher normal, I feel very sorry for them.
Well there are ways that make hitting a calorie deficit easier for some people. For me that tends to come from low carbs and lots of fat. I'm still losing weight because I'm at a deficit but I'm able to maintain that because I don't feel hungry like I do when I eat carbs.
I wish I could say I know what was going on. I have theories as I spent months of my life trying to turn the tables. I eventually gave up and just continued to lift weights and eat normal. Now 4 years later I still have that fat I couldn't lose but I'm a lot bigger (muscle). That fat hasn't gone anywhere and in the 4 years I've yo-yo'd with different attempts to get rid of it. The fat I have is not normal.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1208051#t=article...
Most advice I've heard suggests that going way below your basal metabolic rate calorie consumption isn't that great of an idea, because your body adapts to that reduced calorie range (some people call this "starvation mode"). I would hazard a guess (though this is just a postulate without any data I could find) that this especially applies when you are at a more "normal" weight already.
There's a reason why weight loss is often described as a "lifestyle change".
My theory from my research is that the fat in question is the oldest (fat I've had since youth) and do to it's age has poor vascularity which inhibits the bodies ability to mobilize it. I've read somewhere that your body will over time reduce blood flow to fat (the veins will over time diminish in size and density those areas) which reduces the flow of hormones into that fat and subsequently your bodies ability to break it down and expel it when needed.
I'm no anatomy expert and this is something I read many years ago so I can't argue it's accurate.
Calorie in vs. calorie out is a simplistic way of looking at it. It is certainly true for a first-order approach, though. There is much more to it, such as timing, consumption of fiber with sugar, metabolism, etc. etc. However, the most important factor which should be taken on first for the largest immediate changes is calorie in/out.
I'm curious how much fat you have now? In my experience: With effort I was able to get to about 90% of my goals, but the last 10% is extremely stubborn and I haven't been able to get past it. From what I understand, it would require extreme tactics, such as 10 hours of sleep nightly, eliminating all stress and amino acid accounting to eliminate.
I might suggest reducing the cardio greatly and replacing it with briefer, higher-intensity cardio, btw. The body seems to adjust intake demands very well in response to cardio. Also, what supplements do you use? Finally, I'm a little concerned when you say the fat you have is not normal - you may be straying into the unrealistic psychological zone, but obviously I can't tell much from here. I just don't want you to be obsessing over a physique that is already quite acceptable. Congrats again, your discipline should be inspiring to lots of people... hope you comment doesn't stay gray long.
Can't say how much I have at the moment. Definitely in an upswing since I've been trying to bulk a little. I has this incredible ability to store water (most likely do to fat deposits) and look fluffy. If I zero out my carbs I will piss 20x that day and at 180 lbs the fat will look exactly the same as it did when I was at 148 lbs. Once I look at some bread my body will hold onto everything I drink and I'll fluff right up.
I've read that the last 10% will take all the effort of the first 90% and then some. I tried as I could to power through it and I can honestly say whatever is keep that last 10% is stronger than I am. When you starve for several weeks straight and lose nothing it's hard not to be defeated. I've considered for several years now going under the knife to win it but the prohibitive cost has kept me away from that and the desire to not be defeated by my body.
As I mentioned I've cycled weight lifting / cardio / diet dozens of times over the last few years to keep my body guessing without success.
Supplements: fish oil, multi-vit, whey, creatine, and sometimes fiber.
By not normal I mean old brown adipose or subcutaneous fat with very poor circulation which inhibits the bodies ability to flush hormones through it. This is the fat I've had for 20sh years (was overweight as a child) and I believe the body has practically forgotten about it so to speak.
The calorie in / calorie out has a lot of variables that need adjustment. It's very important not to go on an aggressive diet but requires working down from what you consume right now where the weight is stable (maintenance calories). Unfortunately, what most people don't talk about is the effect of LBM loss and its effect on the RMR/BMR [1]. Your energy expenditure decreases further as you lose the LBM. It will be further worsened if you went for a very aggressive weight loss strategy with very low calories as your body will adjust to that and your hormones might be temporarily imbalanced [2].
Weight lifting and a full strategy for fat loss is essential for long-term success.
I personally do believe metabolic damage (or the better term metabolic slowdown) does happen, but it can be fixed by gradually going back to the correct maintenance calories with a solid weight lifting program (3x per week works) to back it up for a few months. This will result in some gains in the short-term (hopefully more of it being LBM). And you can go back to the fat loss phase again from there.
To add to it, the course the calorie in / calorie out model isn't as simple since macros still need some thought. You definitely need about 0.6-0.8g of protein / lb of bodyweight to gain muscle or about 0.8-0.9g / lb to maintain it at times of calorie deficit. [3]
[1]: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/lean-body-mass-mai... [2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12609816/ [3]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22150425
I spent 12 months eating below 1200 while working out religiously (4-6 days a week with 30sh mins of cardio followed by 45sh mins of weight lifting). In the beginning I lost weight and fast. At 5'9 I went from 240 down to 148 lbs in 7 months.
You just described an example showing that a restricted calorie diet can be wildly successful. The former quote seems provably false using the latter.
Honestly, this is what I just read from your post.
I can't lose weight on a restricted calorie diet. Here is an example of how I lost a huge amount of weight on a restricted calorie diet.
You'll never find a diet/exercise/plan that allows one to achieve indefinite weight lose.
http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf
"ERS data suggest that average daily calorie intake increased by 24.5 percent, or about 530 calories, between 1970 and 2000. Of that 24.5-percent increase, grains (mainly re-fined grain products) contributed 9.5 percentage points; added fats and oils, 9.0 percentage points; added sugars, 4.7 percentage points; fruits and vegetables together, 1.5 percentage points; meats and nuts together, 1 percentage point; and dairy products and eggs together,-1.5 percentage point.)"
I do think going light on highly processed food (including refined sugar and refined grains), and going light on calorie dense oils and fats is pretty good advice for any diet. But that's entirely due to the impact on calorie consumption, not due to any other health bogeyman.
second, and more importantly, this advise is nearly useless. this is like telling an alcoholic to just drink less, or a heroin addict to just stop using. yes, great. eat less, thanks bro. what a revelation.
obese people are addicted to food. they are killing themselves and it's a psychosomatic issue, not a math problem. it requires education, a real desire to change, sometimes special diets to break mental barriers, and a lot more work than just a simple statement like "eat less calories". i guess you must think everyone else is just stupid, right? so simple! just eat less calories. silly addicts, if they only knew about physics...
I neither track calories, nor have "a mindful sense" when eating. My trick is to have no limitations in regards to the kind of food I eat with one rule: eat no more than one meal a day.
Weight loss is hard because you need to figure out some motivator which can outweigh the drive to eat, or you need to figure out a way to satisfy the drive to eat without actually eating lots of calories. It seems to me that fancy advice like "more protein, less sugar" or "avoid processed food" just boils down to this second one; these are foods which fill you up more for any given number of calories.
It's like telling poor people the way to escape poverty is to make more money than they spend.
Of course that is true, but they would be more interested in how to do it, not what to do.
And I personally object to the typical strategy with fructose- "You say it's twice as sweet as sugar so we can use half as much? Nonsense, we're going to use FOUR times as much, and it'll be EIGHT times as sweet!" - so I'm happy to see ordinary sugar being used once again.
So even if the trend is misguided, some good things can happen.
While it seems unimaginable today, in the 80's a breakfast cereal commercial begins, "Can you pinch an inch ?". This commercial ran so often that it forced a lifelong association: more than 1 inch of belly fat means you are out of shape.
I have probably pinched myself once a day, every day, for decades. When I am "out of shape" I stop drinking my calories (juice, soda, milk). It's effortless and only takes a few days to recover.
Wait too long with any problem and there will be no easy fix.
I think if anyone did this to their wife today, it would be grounds for immediate divorce and instant social-media shaming.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2016/01/always-hungry-...
https://medium.com/@davidludwigmd/ludwig-responds-to-whole-h...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2016/01/testing-insuli...
In my case if I have to do it, I'd rather pay the price the first day, then keep the momentum. Also the third/fourth day there is a payout as you get a nice 'mental high'...
And blimey, the friday evening you can eat anything and it'll taste heavenly :-)
Non the less 2:5 sounds cool; please come back to report your experience! :)
Then it's occasional fruit juice in the morning (bit of an energy boost) and coffee only until the friday.
It's a lot easier than it sounds, the 'key' thing is preparation; pick a week were you don't have a lot of 'social' to do, or any heavy physical things planned, and near empty fridge is good; instruction to the family not to decide to cook your favorite meal during the week and so forth.
Otherwise it's as reported; hunger on the first day mostly, then nothing; you get a bit of a metallic taste in the mouth, but tolerable... You get what I only can describe as a 'high' on the third/fourth day.
I lose roughly 1Kg a /day/ with that method, so if you do it once every quarter or so, that's largely enough to make up for some the odd chrismas/party/easter and so on :-)
The body is more than 50% water, so weight is highly variable based on water retention, and fasting causes the body to excrete a lot of water.
For one, no salt intake will cause you to lose water. Secondly, glycogen depletion also causes you to lose water. The metallic taste in the mouth is ketosis, proof of glycogen depletion.
I did it just for fun but noticed significantly improved productivity during the week.
I too would drink juice in the morning and possibly juice or 2 sugarcubes at lunch but not always and no calories otherwise.
To ease into fasting I would start by skipping dinner. Skipping breakfast was then easy (for me at least) and the rest of the week was no problem.
Then during a boring week in the military I decided to test what I had heard that we have 80% left when we feel completely exhausted. So after a couple of days of my "normal" fasting (IIRC) I skipped even my breakfast juice and continued without. Later that day I went to the gym and started lifting weights. 15 minutes into that I was completely drained and I was shaking for hours afterwards (again IIRC). That was my last time. :-/
I want to try again, but with a family it is way harder (and that experience kind of scared me.)
In this case: body/mind hacking.
However, one time I tried to go for three days, and on the third day I got suddenly extremely lightheaded while hanging out with friends, and it was a scary enough that they insisted I end the fast right there (I agreed). My enthusiasm for fasting was tempered quite a bit after that.
Maybe that wouldn't happen the next time I tried going 3+ days, but I don't want to risk it.
Also, I've noticed that driving any serious distance while even on the second day of a two day fast, or concentrating on hard programming problems, can be pretty difficult. That's the main reason I don't do it much anymore (I was in high school and had nothing better to do when I was fasting before).
Right now, alot of dieticiens are still behind the research, but they're slowly getting caught up.
Even the new york times published an article admitting that breakfast was not the most important meal of the day. they showed metastudies that showed there was absolutely NO evidence that showed breakfast was better for your health (other than some correlation based studies). It's time to jetison breakfast and live as our ancestors lived - the way we evolved to live. Nobody back then ate 3 meals a day - this is a new phenomenon started recently within the last several hundred years. the roman army conquered all of europe on just 1 meal a day: called lunch, and they got more excercise than any of us. And before that, people ate infrequently because the food supply was so unstable, often going for days without food.
Personal note: I've been following this diet since Jan 1. I also run ~ 70 miles/week. I've run 3 of my best marathons this year and lost 5 stubborn lbs (145 -> 140, I'm 5'8"). There are other styles of intermittent fasting. I'm enjoying this way of eating.
Aside, a related BBC/Horizon documentary I saw years ago flipped the question of obesity on its head and asked: Why Are Thin People Not Fat?
And the subsequent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863626
Looking at 5:2 simply as a "pattern of eating", however, makes it easier to consider not only the apparent health changes but also other potential benefits, including:
- Reduction of IGF-1 - Prolonged period of not eating as a means to promote cell repair - Shining a light on the cultural norms around eating three square meals a day with/without snacks in between.
After watching the documentary it seems like 5:2 may be more than just another "fad" diet.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-real...
Here are articles that are unbalanced but on the other end of spectrum (pro sugar).
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...
http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...
It's interesting that in the USA the calorie consumption rose from 80s to 00s from 3100 to 3600.
In the UK and Australia they eat less fructose but more calories.
Everyone keeps on getting fatter.
There's not a single food to blame. Any food can't be healthy or unhealthy. Diets can be healthy or unhealthy. Thinking otherwise is a sign of unhealthy relationship with food. Avoiding stuff because it is carcinogenic (processed meat) or correlates with cancer (red meat) is ridiculous.
Eating large amounts every day (which is what most of the obese do) isn't?
I don't care if apples have cyanide or 60g of fructose will give me liver disease. I won't eat 50 bananas a day, I won't eat 100 apples a day, I'll eat agave syrup all over my pancakes and won't feel a thing. It's food. I enjoy it. Having fructose in it, or animal products just means I can easily overdose if I consume it every day but I won't.
I have genetic metabolic disease and I have thought about this many times. My conclusion is simple enough: Eat real food, ignore the macros, listen to your body and adapt your food intake accordingly. Paul Jaminet's diet [1] is the closest I have found to fit this idea.
Collecting data is never a bad thing and is always worth doing.
I disagree strongly. Eating shouldn't make you tired. I could eat 2 1/3 pound greasy cheeseburgers with toppings but if I skip the buns, I feel like I ate nothing.
There is something legitimate to intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, avoiding refined carbs, avoiding bread etc.
I have a serious disease that is thought to prevented by ketogenic diets. And I think there's an equal chance I got the disease from refined carbs as anything else.
I also know many so-called experts in this field (MDs) and they know nothing; and worse they do not want to know anything.
My conclusion is simple: just don't eat bread or drink any sugary drinks.
There is strong evidence that a ketogenic diet helps prevent/diminish seizures in epileptic patients. And there's some initial but promising research it can help reduce symptoms of Alzheimer's disease – and possibly Parkinson's and ALS. There's also some very early research that a ketogenic diet might slow the growth of certain cancerous tumors. But specifically for cancer, there's also evidence that a ketogenic diet has no long-term improvement of survivorship – though might have short-term improvement. My conclusion is that the science is still very much out, and it's way too early, from my layman's reading, to make any claim about those diseases being caused by refined carbs.
There are many possible causes; in my case, it is a single large scale deletion in my mitochondrial DNA.
Symptoms are varied. In my case: extremely weak eye muscles (I have both ptosis and diplopia), intermittent fatigue, mild aerobic exercise intolerance and hot intolerance.
From a scale of 1 to 10, being 10 the worst, I rate myself at 3. So, I am doing fine. Watching what I eat, doing some exercise and controlling stress made a big difference in my quality of life (going from 7 to 3)
mild aerobic exercise intolerance
Do not see why. In fact, I agree with you 100%.
>>> I have a serious disease that is thought to prevented by ketogenic diets
Are you epileptic ? Know a couple of kids with secondary epilepsia that are doing great with a keto diet
The middle two pieces of advice seem somewhat contradictory. I usually get a pretty strong sense for which macro I'm primarily hungry for. "listening to my body" is intimately tied to picking the macros that make up my meal[1]. Or did you mean something more like "avoid planning macros contrary to your appetite signals"?
[1] obviously I don't have meals that consist entirely of protein powder or fruit juice, but it just gives me a sense of what type of food to emphasize in meal to avoid the irritating " full but still hungry" feeling.
This. Same for planning ahead gym workouts.
The audience for "pop nutritionists" is the normal, healthy human. Whatever that is. I'd LOVE for their to be a model, baseline, reference healthy human. To study and emulate. Then I could compare and contrast myself to that model, adjust accordingly.
On the flip side, note that some of the nutrition plans are meant for certain conditions. Like the Univ of Wash doctor who "cured" his diabetes patients with all meat diets.
you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.
Please see my post above.
>>> you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.
Completely possible. It has helped me tremendously though.
In this context, "real food" means anything that you would find in nature in the same form - excluding changes due to cooking - as you would eat it. Some examples:
- Potato, orange, nuts, milk, eggs, meat: Real food
- Bread, Pasta, Chocolate (no cocoa): Nope
I know that this leaves lots of grey zones (butter, coffee, ...), but you get the idea.
I cannot help but recognize that my approach is very simple; some would say simplistic, and I would partially agree, but it has been working great for me. Bear in mind that my metabolism is completely broken, so you mileage may vary.
It really is simple.
- Reduce carbs/sugar intake to around ~100 grams/day, this varies slightly per person. Just reducing bread/grain intake alone is a TON. Grains are turned into glucose, same as sugar, it's effectively the same thing. This also means getting rid of all sweats, processed food. They are just bad for you whether you are overweight or not...don't do it. Occasional is fine.
- Drink water. Often times when you are hungry, you're dehydrated. If you drink soda or something else, do the "diet" version at least. Diet Coke, Miller Lite, etc.
- Portions. Most restaurants in the U.S. server portions that are way too big. Eat half your plate, then wait 10 - 15 min while having a conversation with others or whatever, do something else. Take your mind off food. I bet after 15 min, you won't be that hungry anymore. That super tired feeling you get after a big meal...yeah, you should never have that. That means you overate.
- Get your heart rate up for at least 10 min a day. Try to do an hour, but sometimes that's not practical with limited time, etc. Even just doing jumping jacks for 10 min will do the trick...Just do it. It's crazy how many people will go a day...a week..or more without out ever getting their heart rate above 100 bpm... That's terribly bad for you.
Forget all the fads or popular, trending stuff out there... They try to sell you on quick fixes. Weight loss is not a quick fix. Instead of viewing it as trying to lose weight, just look at it like trying to live a healthy life style. Don't obsess checking the scale everyday or counting calories. Take a picture of yourself in underwear once a week in the mirror. Every month, not any smaller intervals, check your 4 pictures from that month and see how far you've come. This should drive you more.
That's it, you'll be healthy in no time.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/20140917/artificial-sweeteners-blo...
They probably aren't great for you, but I don't think it's near as bad as consuming 40g of sugar/High fructose corn syrup per soda...
Ideally you stay away from both, but If you are going to drink a soda/sweetened drink, go with the one with 0g sugar and 0g carbs...
Its too easy to intake an stupid amount of carbs and sugar from just liquids...3 sodas in one day and boom...140g of carbs/sugar already...even worse, their "empty carbs", which is to say, it provides you with no nutritional energy/value.
Note: I'm not a dietician/nutritionist. Just someone who has used the above methods and have had great results.
It is still a fringe theory in the context of "mainstream" nutritional science. It just happens to also be a theory that aligns surprisingly well with evidence. This paradox is what makes the story increasingly interesting to the community and media.
Whether or not the fundamentals of this line of argument turn out to be ultimately correct, it shines a light on the way practical science can become myopic.
the answer to why people are getting fatter isn't some evil sugar molecule; it's that people are overconsuming food.
Not that I disagree with the premise of this article, but the graphs I can find show that there is a steep increase in the late 70's, not after the Dietary Guidelines were written in the early 80's.
But still, the upward trend follows the cultural meme that "fat is bad" that started propagating in the early 1970s. The dietary guidelines only formalized that bit of "scientific wisdom".
(naturally, correlation does not equal causation, but it does often indicate a phenomenon of interest, worthy of further investigation)
The McGovern committee (of the U.S. senate) published the first Dietary Goals For The United States in 1977. This was supposed to reverse the epidemic of heart disease.
McGovern rubber-stamped the prevailing views first made popular by Ancel Keys' Seven Countries Study, published in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study
So the steep increase in starting in the late 70s is right on time....
We are free people (I hope). If one decide to buy tobacco, it's his own responsibility, and he should have the freedom to do so.
Smokers are net over-contributors in most countries, cigarette taxes vastly exceed health care costs, in no small part to shorter lifespans of smokers and often quick deaths.
> health impacts on non-smokers
Maybe if you work in a smoking bar/restaurant (which is your choice) or live with someone who smokes inside.
> the simple impact it has on the happiness of those subjected to your freedom
I'll worry about that when society starts extending the same courtesy.
I can agree that someone should be free to smoke in their house, provided they have no dependents. Again, I don't have a strong opinion, probably because [in parts of the world anyways] I feel things are decently balanced (maybe you disagree). I was just curious.
From where do you derive that "right"?
Can we ban motorcycles because they regularly disturb my otherwise quiet street and frequently kill their riders, many of whom ride their bikes at irresponsible speeds that put other road users in danger?
Or how about alcohol, which kills many more people each year than all illegal drugs combined, which causes many people to drive drunk which puts innocent people in danger, or which causes some people to get violent and start fights in the street? I doubt there's a single pub in Australia that doesn't host at least one drunk fight a week, and dozens of young people have been killed in punch-ups with other young people who had one too many and think they're invincible.
I don't and never have smoked, but I think the freedom argument is pretty strong. Not allowing tobacco companies to lie about their product, is a good move. Banning them, not so much.
Why do you think we have regulations in healthcare etc? Because lots of folks can't decide if something is healthy or not.
No one is forced to buy over-sweetened foods clearly marked with the contents so why blame manufacturers for providing what people want? The food they sell is not toxic but certainly the proportions consumed can be and frequently are. Down to us not the manufacturer.
It shouldn't be very different metabolically (the splitting of sucrose into glucose and fructose happens quick and early in the digestion process), but it tastes somewhat different.
Sugar is toxic to nerves and your body has to heal after every spike.
Yes, it's usually down to us, just so many of 'us' are on the payroll of various lobby groups so most of every popular internet forum is heavily spinned instead of providing info.
Your post seems very biased.
Soybean oil is useful as biodiesel, and not much else.
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16757819 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T78cJv6gi88 - http://oregonstate.edu/dept/biochem/hhmi/hhmiclasses/biochem...
If you were to get an expeller pressed, unfiltered soybean oil, it would be just fine.
Yay, go internet. The public opinions of the elites on complex contested matters often seem to degenerate into something like party politics.
Check mueslis and the sugar most of them contains. It's _horrible_. I try buying a no sugar muesli once in a while - within regular european supermarkets, it's next to impossible!
I eat my unsweetened muesli with yoghurt (like the Swiss do), and find it quite tasty.
Don't overdo the dried fruit though since you'll end up defeating the point of unsweetened muesli!
"But that brings up a third possibility, that lipidology is complex enough to have fooled us completely, and that HDL and LDL are not, in fact, good markers at all. [...] Several large companies have poured hundreds of millions of dollars apiece down the drain in finding this out for us."
Complex topic, but this sentence to me was the most interesting from the story; in part, because of how much focus is put on solving problems that do not harm nearly as many Americans being over weight & unhealthy.
It be curious to know if this topic has even come up once in America's election.
There is never been a scientific study that showed being overweight (not obese) causes health problems. And the opposite causality (weight gain resulting from unrelated health problems) is incredibly common.
Julie Guthman's book "Weighing In" goes into detail.
All the naysayers should continue to eat sugar, and let nature do it's "thing".
It's interesting the author notes trans-fats as a by product of the injuction against fat, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Trans-fat has been around since the 1900's and was used widely as a substitute for butter when it was in short supply during WWII. Remember Crisco? Mom's in the 1970's used it for everything, including baking and cooking. It wasn't until the 1990's that the FDA finally put warnings out regarding partially hydrogenated oil.
The fact is, trans fats had been around a LONG time before before the government decided to start saying that it was bad for your health. Hell, it took them another decade before they made the recommendation to stop using trans fats after the 1980 guidelines came out.
1) Natural prevalence: Glucose is more common 2) Digestion: Glucose is transported by different mechanisms from the gut to the bloodstream. The mechanisms for fructose are in some people significantly weaker 3) Regulation in the body: Glucose is regulated by insulin and handled by all cells. Fructose is left to the liver and contributes to blood triglycerides.
If intake, processing, regulation and resting places are different should there not always be two different discussions?
Unrelated to nutrition, but libraries and inter-library lending can track down all sorts of things and your taxes already pay for this service, so take advantage of it.
I wonder why more women don't want to go into science.
From that point of view not that much changed really.
The beauty of this puzzle for most people can be solved with a modicum of info, simple maths and listening to their body. Treating indigestion, constipation and other irritants with magic pills only masks the symptoms of bigger problems, most of which can be cured by diet & physical activity. Of course, as always, YMMV.
As a species we're becoming more knowledgable at a staggering pace right now. If you think the non-academic world is not benefitting from having access to the Internet you are crazy.
edit: typos & clarity
We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.
Good for her! Milk is one of the most nutritious foods you can get. Lots of protein, vitamin B12, calcium, riboflavin etc. It reduces the risk of osteoporosis -- important for ageing people -- and tends to reduce blood pressure.
And the downside that it may increase the risk of prostate cancer in men is one that your mother doesn't have to worry about ;-)
lots of vegetables, fatty meats, rice for carbs, and no addded sugars, and nothing you see in bakeries ( ie no breads etc) and virtually no pasta.
If pasta is cooked al dente (why would you cook it any other way?!), the glycemic index will be lower than that of white or brown rice - this means it impacts your blood glucose levels less.
That being said, even your simplified recommendations are wrong. A ton of research exists linking saturated fat to systemic inflammation and a worsening of insulin sensitivity in pre-diabetic populations. Rice is fairly bad carb source in terms of nutrients/calorie (not to mention arsenic contamination in American rice) - the only thing it has going for it is it is hypo-allergenic. Whole wheat/multigrain sourdough bread is actually a really good carb source. Additionally, there are premium pastas like Barilla protein plus that are good as well.
Many nutritionists are prescribing the exact opposite of it: avoid fasting for more than very few hours. Heck, my coworker have a timer that fires every 2 hours to remind him to eat something.
Nutritionists get attacked both for jumping on "trendy" new ideas and for being too conservative. Really is no winning. Someone is going to criticise.
Plus much of the advice people read doesn't come from anyone qualified, even the term "nutritionist" has different meanings in different places and requires literally no qualifications at all in some jurisdictions (they're essentially "alternative medicine" practitioners).
Dietitians often require at least SOME professional training and certification. That's who a doctor will refer you to, rather than a nutritionist.
As I understand it, food manufacturers are going away from sugar a little. Sucralose provides a similar sweetness at no additional calories and with a longer shelf life.
Stop sweetening. Period. There's a lot more to flavour than just sweet, and the sooner we can revive our taste for other flavours, the better our children will be.
Take the European Sugarwise for instance: https://www.facebook.com/aboutsugarwise/. Powered by a handful of social entrepreneurs, Sugarwise is a mobile application to count nutrient intake and provide diet alternations when nutrient deficiencies are detected. The idea started with raising awareness about added sugar and exposing it in foods, and grew to cover a full range of nutrients and minerals. The bests part of it is that it is one of many great social projects that shape our future.
It tastes good, and you consume a lot of it. Kind of easy to make an inference. Doesn't require any research.
I was taugt from my childhood that excessive sugar leads to obesity and diabetes. Not that I cut down its consumption by a lot :), but at least I was aware, as everybody else around me.
Maybe it's because we're all hypochondriacs here so we assume that anything is bad for you unless proven otherwise.
Saturated fats still do cause heart disease, strokes, alzheimers.. anything where blood is blocked or doesnt reach the organ it needs to.
If anything, processed sugars like HFCS which is extracted from corn by a chemical enzyme process, could be the cause. But the problem to me is when people think chocolate bar, cake, pizza or milk shake.. these are food items with 75% calories from fat. So if you exclude high fat items and greatly reduce heavily processed sugar foods, you will not have the issues we are facing today.
Expecially in reponse to an article that talks at length about others in nutritional science using ad hominem attacks as a primary form of defence against dissident arguments.
A cosmologist may know all about the orbit of the planets but still say 'The sun rose this morning'.
Against alternative explanations, I prefer. Dissident carries a negative connotation that is unwarranted here.
All the studies claiming to make these links have been comprehensively debunked. And it's worth remembering that the vast, vast bulk of fats and cholesterol in your body are not dietary, they were produced inside your body from other macro-nutrients. And they are essential. Without them you would die.
On a very basic level, blood flow gets blocked because inflammation in your arteries causes cholesterol manufactured by your liver to stick to the walls and build up. Consuming saturated fat does not cause this inflammation. Whereas there is evidence that consuming sugar does.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820038
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22850317
http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(15)0...
and make you gain weight http://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-finds...
Re: 20820038 - Keto is low carb, moderate protein. it doesn't really matter where you get the protein from.
Re: 22850371 - Again, Ketogenic is not HIGH protein diet as eating too much protein is just turned into sugar which defeats the whole purpose of eating keto... so yes, if you eat a lot of fat, and a lot of sugar, you will die sooner.
re: Cell.com - it measured whether or not these people went into ketosis for 6 whole days, when it takes upwards of 3 months to become keto-adapted. It takes the average person (not the morbidly obese person) 3-5 days just to get into ketosis, let alone keto-adapted.
Keto macros are supposed to (generally) be:
80% calories from fat (I try to get 200g/day)
15% calories from protein (I try to keep mine around 120g/day)
5% calories from carbs (keep it under net 20g/day)
This is pretty difficult to do. I usually end up somewhere around 70-75% fat, 7%ish carbs, 20%ish protein. But at least I can eat bacon wrapped avocados without guilt... i'm constantly adjusting to get my macros. I just added MCT oil to the daily diet.
I was (am?) obese when I started this and I've dropped a considerable amount of weight (30+lbs), and my blood sugar has dropped and stabilized. I'm not keto-adapted yet, though.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12716665
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2619783
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
"CONCLUSIONS: A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat."
Fructose, which Lustig (and other scientists) suspect as the prime cause is present in both HFCS and granulated sugar (cane or beet). It’s my understanding that the difference in fructose quantity between HFCS (55% Fructose, 45% glucose) and granulated sugar (50-50) is not a significant factor.
Difference between sugar and HFCS in the US is generally people add sugar themselves. And HFCS is added by the producer. Compare you putting a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee with the 10 teaspoons of HFCS in a can of coke. If you buy your coke at the quik mart it may also be HFCS 70/30 to boot.
I just googled images and videos of him, in case your statement had some validity. The Lustig I saw looked like an ordinary man. Not detectably obese and certainly not morbidly obese.
Those are all junk food. Use sparingly. Try eating a piece of fruit instead.
I mean, FFS, I really like chocolate, but of course it's unhealthy. Salads and fish are healthy. Everyone knows that.
Eat sparingly.
Balance.
let's have an example, lets say you eat a balanced diet, plenty of fibre, micronutrients, protein, fats, and you have 300 calories left for the day before you go over your maintenance intake. you decide to eat a mars bar. unhealthy? not at all.
another example, you don't eat enough fibre, because all you eat is pizza pockets. you drink coke instead of water, you go over your maintenance intake by 500 calories and decide to have a mars bar. unhealthy? yes. but it wasn't the specific food that was unhealthy.
unfortunately things aren't as simplistic as you want them to be, you have to look at things in the context of the diet.
I don't believe this statement is true. Calories in pizzas are generally around 1:1 from carbs:fat[1]. Likewise with a typical (i.e. low cocoa solids) chocolate bar[2], milk[3], or cake[4].
Calories in a milkshake are likely to be from 2:1 carbs:fat, at best (milkshake generally equals milk, plus sugar, fruit and flavourings).
[1] http://corporate.dominos.co.uk/Media/Default/CSR/Nutritional... [2] http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=273968548 [3] http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=254656543 [4] http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=257617038